OpenRaiser/Intern-Atlas huggingface dataset:
Stochastic Bandit Models for Delayed Conversions
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Online advertising and product recommendation are important domains of applications for multi-armed bandit methods. In these fields, the reward that is immediately available is most often only a proxy for the actual outcome of interest, which we refer to as a conversion. For instance, in web advertising, clicks can be observed within a few seconds after an ad display but the corresponding sale --if any-- will take hours, if not days to happen. This paper proposes and investigates a new stochas-tic multi-armed bandit model in the framework proposed by Chapelle (2014) --based on empirical studies in the field of web advertising-- in which each action may trigger a future reward that will then happen with a stochas-tic delay. We assume that the probability of conversion associated with each action is unknown while the distribution of the conversion delay is known, distinguishing between the (idealized) case where the conversion events may be observed whatever their delay and the more realistic setting in which late conversions are censored. We provide performance lower bounds as well as two simple but efficient algorithms based on the UCB and KLUCB frameworks. The latter algorithm, which is preferable when conversion rates are low, is based on a Poissonization argument, of independent interest in other settings where aggregation of Bernoulli observations with different success probabilities is required.
Energy-Based Sequence GANs for Recommendation and Their Connection to Imitation Learning
Venue: arXiv cs.IR 2017
Year: 2017

Recommender systems aim to find an accurate and efficient mapping from historic data of user-preferred items to a new item that is to be liked by a user. Towards this goal, energy-based sequence generative adversarial nets (EB-SeqGANs) are adopted for recommendation by learning a generative model for the time series of user-preferred items. By recasting the energy function as the feature function, the proposed EB-SeqGANs is interpreted as an instance of maximum-entropy imitation learning.
Subtropical Satisfiability
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2017
Year: 2017

Quantifier-free nonlinear arithmetic (QF_NRA) appears in many applications of satisfiability modulo theories solving (SMT). Accordingly, efficient reasoning for corresponding constraints in SMT theory solvers is highly relevant. We propose a new incomplete but efficient and terminating method to identify satisfiable instances. The method is derived from the subtropical method recently introduced in the context of symbolic computation for computing real zeros of single very large multivariate polynomials. Our method takes as input conjunctions of strict polynomial inequalities, which represent more than 40% of the QF_NRA section of the SMT-LIB library of benchmarks. The method takes an abstraction of polynomials as exponent vectors over the natural numbers tagged with the signs of the corresponding coefficients. It then uses, in turn, SMT to solve linear problems over the reals to heuristically find suitable points that translate back to satisfying points for the original problem. Systematic experiments on the SMT-LIB demonstrate that our method is not a sufficiently strong decision procedure by itself but a valuable heuristic to use within a portfolio of techniques.
Classic papers: déjà vu, a step further in the bibliometric exploitation of Google Scholar
Venue: arXiv cs.DL 2017
Year: 2017

After giving a brief overview of Eugene Garfield contributions to the issue of identifying and studying the most cited scientific articles, manifested in the creation of his Citation Classics, the main characteristics and features of Google Scholar new service Classic Papers, as well as its main strengths and weaknesses, are addressed. This product currently displays the most cited English-language original research articles by fields and published in 2006
A Web-based Application for the Management of Seminar Assignments
Venue: arXiv cs.CY 2017
Year: 2017

Seminar activities never occur randomly or in a vacuum. Carefully planned and well-organized thematically, they allow both undergraduates and graduates to explore in (more) detail various subject areas of particular interest to every individual or group. Discussion and participation characterize this form of learning, which is often supplemented by in-class presentations of previously assigned tasks. The preparation of assignments often presupposes a lot of self-study and research; it is desirable that the student group enrolled in the same seminar be able to share all points of view, results and conclusions. The present paper presents an information system designed to manage the assignments proposed in a seminar and balance students' individual study load. The system was developed in PHP language with all editable features stored in MySQL database for the best speed and performance results. With a modular organization, the system relies on various entities such as Student, Theme, Keyword, Reference, etc. The implemented procedures are enhanced by a user-friendly graphic interface (this will be described in another paper). The system is easy to use; it eliminates appointment dysfunctions, allows students to have their say in selecting/accepting a task and even to correlate their decision with the proposed date for presentation.
The YouTube-8M Kaggle Competition: Challenges and Methods
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

We took part in the YouTube-8M Video Understanding Challenge hosted on Kaggle, and achieved the 10th place within less than one month's time. In this paper, we present an extensive analysis and solution to the underlying machine-learning problem based on frame-level data, where major challenges are identified and corresponding preliminary methods are proposed. It's noteworthy that, with merely the proposed strategies and uniformly-averaging multi-crop ensemble was it sufficient for us to reach our ranking. We also report the methods we believe to be promising but didn't have enough time to train to convergence. We hope this paper could serve, to some extent, as a review and guideline of the YouTube-8M multi-label video classification benchmark, inspiring future attempts and research.
Deep Learning Based Large-Scale Automatic Satellite Crosswalk Classification
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

High-resolution satellite imagery have been increasingly used on remote sensing classification problems. One of the main factors is the availability of this kind of data. Even though, very little effort has been placed on the zebra crossing classification problem. In this letter, crowdsourcing systems are exploited in order to enable the automatic acquisition and annotation of a large-scale satellite imagery database for crosswalks related tasks. Then, this dataset is used to train deep-learning-based models in order to accurately classify satellite images that contains or not zebra crossings. A novel dataset with more than 240,000 images from 3 continents, 9 countries and more than 20 cities was used in the experiments. Experimental results showed that freely available crowdsourcing data can be used to accurately (97.11%) train robust models to perform crosswalk classification on a global scale.
Stealthy Deception Attacks Against SCADA Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.CR 2017
Year: 2017

SCADA protocols for Industrial Control Systems (ICS) are vulnerable to network attacks such as session hijacking. Hence, research focuses on network anomaly detection based on meta--data (message sizes, timing, command sequence), or on the state values of the physical process. In this work we present a class of semantic network-based attacks against SCADA systems that are undetectable by the above mentioned anomaly detection. After hijacking the communication channels between the Human Machine Interface (HMI) and Programmable Logic Controllers (PLCs), our attacks cause the HMI to present a fake view of the industrial process, deceiving the human operator into taking manual actions. Our most advanced attack also manipulates the messages generated by the operator's actions, reversing their semantic meaning while causing the HMI to present a view that is consistent with the attempted human actions. The attacks are totaly stealthy because the message sizes and timing, the command sequences, and the data values of the ICS's state all remain legitimate. We implemented and tested several attack scenarios in the test lab of our local electric company, against a real HMI and real PLCs, separated by a commercial-grade firewall. We developed a real-time security assessment tool, that can simultaneously manipulate the communication to multiple PLCs and cause the HMI to display a coherent system--wide fake view. Our tool is configured with message-manipulating rules written in an ICS Attack Markup Language (IAML) we designed, which may be of independent interest. Our semantic attacks all successfully fooled the operator and brought the system to states of blackout and possible equipment damage.
An Extension of the κ-μ$\,$Shadowed Fading Model: Statistical Characterization and Applications
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

We here introduce an extension and natural generalization of both the κ-μ$\,$shadowed and the classical Beckmann fading models: the Fluctuating Beckmann (FB) fading model. This new model considers the clustering of multipath waves on which the line-of-sight (LoS) components randomly fluctuate, together with the effect of in-phase/quadrature power imbalance in the LoS and non-LoS components. Thus, it unifies a variety of important fading distributions as the one-sided Gaussian, Rayleigh, Nakagami-m, Rician, κ-μ, η-μ, η-κ, Beckmann, Rician shadowed and the κ-μ$\,$shadowed distribution. The chief probability functions of the FB fading model, namely probability density function, cumulative distribution function and moment generating function are derived. The second-order statistics such as the level crossing rate and the average fade duration are also analyzed. These results can be used to derive some performance metrics of interest of wireless communication systems operating over FB fading channels.
Retinal Vessel Segmentation in Fundoscopic Images with Generative Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Retinal vessel segmentation is an indispensable step for automatic detection of retinal diseases with fundoscopic images. Though many approaches have been proposed, existing methods tend to miss fine vessels or allow false positives at terminal branches. Let alone under-segmentation, over-segmentation is also problematic when quantitative studies need to measure the precise width of vessels. In this paper, we present a method that generates the precise map of retinal vessels using generative adversarial training. Our methods achieve dice coefficient of 0.829 on DRIVE dataset and 0.834 on STARE dataset which is the state-of-the-art performance on both datasets.
HLOC: Hints-Based Geolocation Leveraging Multiple Measurement Frameworks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Geographically locating an IP address is of interest for many purposes. There are two major ways to obtain the location of an IP address: querying commercial databases or conducting latency measurements. For structural Internet nodes, such as routers, commercial databases are limited by low accuracy, while current measurement-based approaches overwhelm users with setup overhead and scalability issues. In this work we present our system HLOC, aiming to combine the ease of database use with the accuracy of latency measurements. We evaluate HLOC on a comprehensive router data set of 1.4M IPv4 and 183k IPv6 routers. HLOC first extracts location hints from rDNS names, and then conducts multi-tier latency measurements. Configuration complexity is minimized by using publicly available large-scale measurement frameworks such as RIPE Atlas. Using this measurement, we can confirm or disprove the location hints found in domain names. We publicly release HLOC's ready-to-use source code, enabling researchers to easily increase geolocation accuracy with minimum overhead.
DynASP2.5: Dynamic Programming on Tree Decompositions in Action
Venue: arXiv cs.LO 2017
Year: 2017

A vibrant theoretical research area are efficient exact parameterized algorithms. Very recent solving competitions such as the PACE challenge show that there is also increasing practical interest in the parameterized algorithms community. An important research question is whether dedicated parameterized exact algorithms exhibit certain practical relevance and one can even beat well-established problem solvers. We consider the logic-based declarative modeling language and problem solving framework Answer Set Programming (ASP). State-of-the-art ASP solvers rely considerably on Sat-based algorithms. An ASP solver (DynASP2), which is based on a classical dynamic programming on tree decompositions, has been published very recently. Unfortunately, DynASP2 can outperform modern ASP solvers on programs of small treewidth only if the question of interest is to count the number of solutions. In this paper, we describe underlying concepts of our new implementation (DynASP2.5) that shows competitive behavior to state-of-the-art ASP solvers even for finding just one solution when solving problems as the Steiner tree problem that have been modeled in ASP on graphs with low treewidth. Our implementation is based on a novel approach that we call multi-pass dynamic programming (M-DPSINC).
Exponential lower bounds for history-based simplex pivot rules on abstract cubes
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2017
Year: 2017

The behavior of the simplex algorithm is a widely studied subject. Specifically, the question of the existence of a polynomial pivot rule for the simplex algorithm is of major importance. Here, we give exponential lower bounds for three history-based pivot rules. Those rules decide their next step based on memory of the past steps. In particular, we study Zadeh's least entered rule, Johnson's least-recently basic rule and Cunningham's least-recently considered (or round-robin) rule. We give exponential lower bounds on Acyclic Unique Sink Orientations (AUSO) of the abstract cube, for all of these pivot rules. For Johnson's rule our bound is the first superpolynomial one in any context; for Zadeh's it is the first one for AUSO. Those two are our main results.
The difference between memory and prediction in linear recurrent networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

Recurrent networks are trained to memorize their input better, often in the hopes that such training will increase the ability of the network to predict. We show that networks designed to memorize input can be arbitrarily bad at prediction. We also find, for several types of inputs, that one-node networks optimized for prediction are nearly at upper bounds on predictive capacity given by Wiener filters, and are roughly equivalent in performance to randomly generated five-node networks. Our results suggest that maximizing memory capacity leads to very different networks than maximizing predictive capacity, and that optimizing recurrent weights can decrease reservoir size by half an order of magnitude.
Data-driven Natural Language Generation: Paving the Road to Success
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

We argue that there are currently two major bottlenecks to the commercial use of statistical machine learning approaches for natural language generation (NLG): (a) The lack of reliable automatic evaluation metrics for NLG, and (b) The scarcity of high quality in-domain corpora. We address the first problem by thoroughly analysing current evaluation metrics and motivating the need for a new, more reliable metric. The second problem is addressed by presenting a novel framework for developing and evaluating a high quality corpus for NLG training.
Toward Computation and Memory Efficient Neural Network Acoustic Models with Binary Weights and Activations
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

Neural network acoustic models have significantly advanced state of the art speech recognition over the past few years. However, they are usually computationally expensive due to the large number of matrix-vector multiplications and nonlinearity operations. Neural network models also require significant amounts of memory for inference because of the large model size. For these two reasons, it is challenging to deploy neural network based speech recognizers on resource-constrained platforms such as embedded devices. This paper investigates the use of binary weights and activations for computation and memory efficient neural network acoustic models. Compared to real-valued weight matrices, binary weights require much fewer bits for storage, thereby cutting down the memory footprint. Furthermore, with binary weights or activations, the matrix-vector multiplications are turned into addition and subtraction operations, which are computationally much faster and more energy efficient for hardware platforms. In this paper, we study the applications of binary weights and activations for neural network acoustic modeling, reporting encouraging results on the WSJ and AMI corpora.
User Clustering for Multicast Precoding in Multi-Beam Satellite Systems
Venue: arXiv cs.IT 2017
Year: 2017

Current State-of-the-Art High Throughput Satellite systems provide wide-area connectivity through multi-beam architectures. However, due to the tremendous system throughput requirements that next generation Satellite Communications expect to achieve, traditional 4-colour frequency reuse schemes, i.e., two frequency bands with two orthogonal polarisations, are not sufficient anymore and more aggressive solutions as full frequency reuse are gaining momentum. These approaches require advanced interference management techniques to cope with the significantly increased inter-beam interference, like multicast precoding and Multi User Detection. With respect to the former, several peculiar challenges arise when designed for SatCom systems. In particular, to maximise resource usage while minimising delay and latency, multiple users are multiplexed in the same frame, thus imposing to consider multiple channel matrices when computing the precoding weights. In this paper, we focus on this aspect by re-formulating it as a clustering problem. After introducing a novel mathematical framework, we design a k-means-based clustering algorithm to group users into simultaneously precoded and served clusters. Two similarity metrics are used to this aim: the users' Euclidean distance and their channel distance, i.e., distance in the multidimensional channel vector space. Through extensive numerical simulations, we substantiate the proposed algorithms and identify the parameters driving the system performance.
Symmetry-guided design of topologies for supercomputer networks
Venue: arXiv cs.DM 2017
Year: 2017

A family of graphs optimized as the topologies for supercomputer interconnection networks is proposed. The special needs of such network topologies, minimal diameter and mean path length, are met by special constructions of the weight vectors in a representation of the symplectic algebra. Such theoretical design of topologies can conveniently reconstruct the mesh and hypercubic graphs, widely used as today's network topologies. Our symplectic algebraic approach helps generate many classes of graphs suitable for network topologies.
Frame-Semantic Parsing with Softmax-Margin Segmental RNNs and a Syntactic Scaffold
Venue: arXiv cs.CL 2017
Year: 2017

We present a new, efficient frame-semantic parser that labels semantic arguments to FrameNet predicates. Built using an extension to the segmental RNN that emphasizes recall, our basic system achieves competitive performance without any calls to a syntactic parser. We then introduce a method that uses phrase-syntactic annotations from the Penn Treebank during training only, through a multitask objective; no parsing is required at training or test time. This "syntactic scaffold" offers a cheaper alternative to traditional syntactic pipelining, and achieves state-of-the-art performance.
Dynamic Video Streaming in Caching-enabled Wireless Mobile Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.NI 2017
Year: 2017

Recent advances in software-defined mobile networks (SDMNs), in-network caching, and mobile edge computing (MEC) can have great effects on video services in next generation mobile networks. In this paper, we jointly consider SDMNs, in-network caching, and MEC to enhance the video service in next generation mobile networks. With the objective of maximizing the mean measurement of video quality, an optimization problem is formulated. Due to the coupling of video data rate, computing resource, and traffic engineering (bandwidth provisioning and paths selection), the problem becomes intractable in practice. Thus, we utilize dual-decomposition method to decouple those three sets of variables. Extensive simulations are conducted with different system configurations to show the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.
Distributional Adversarial Networks
Venue: arXiv cs.LG 2017
Year: 2017

We propose a framework for adversarial training that relies on a sample rather than a single sample point as the fundamental unit of discrimination. Inspired by discrepancy measures and two-sample tests between probability distributions, we propose two such distributional adversaries that operate and predict on samples, and show how they can be easily implemented on top of existing models. Various experimental results show that generators trained with our distributional adversaries are much more stable and are remarkably less prone to mode collapse than traditional models trained with pointwise prediction discriminators. The application of our framework to domain adaptation also results in considerable improvement over recent state-of-the-art.
Path Integral Networks: End-to-End Differentiable Optimal Control
Venue: arXiv cs.AI 2017
Year: 2017

In this paper, we introduce Path Integral Networks (PI-Net), a recurrent network representation of the Path Integral optimal control algorithm. The network includes both system dynamics and cost models, used for optimal control based planning. PI-Net is fully differentiable, learning both dynamics and cost models end-to-end by back-propagation and stochastic gradient descent. Because of this, PI-Net can learn to plan. PI-Net has several advantages: it can generalize to unseen states thanks to planning, it can be applied to continuous control tasks, and it allows for a wide variety learning schemes, including imitation and reinforcement learning. Preliminary experiment results show that PI-Net, trained by imitation learning, can mimic control demonstrations for two simulated problems; a linear system and a pendulum swing-up problem. We also show that PI-Net is able to learn dynamics and cost models latent in the demonstrations.
CS591 Report: Application of siamesa network in 2D transformation
Venue: arXiv cs.CV 2017
Year: 2017

Deep learning has been extensively used various aspects of computer vision area. Deep learning separate itself from traditional neural network by having a much deeper and complicated network layers in its network structures. Traditionally, deep neural network is abundantly used in computer vision tasks including classification and detection and has achieve remarkable success and set up a new state of the art results in these fields. Instead of using neural network for vision recognition and detection. I will show the ability of neural network to do image registration, synthesis of images and image retrieval in this report.